Fatopia

Less than a year ago, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta drew some pretty righteous fire for its childhood obesity campaign, and now a similar campaign in Minnesota is opening old wounds. Critics of both charge that shaming people promotes unhappiness, not health, and that shaming children is just plain mean. It’s also redundant of what their peers do to them every day of their lives … lives that are difficult enough without the added burden of bad press.

Know what, though? There’s a big ‘ol elephant in the room, and I ain’t talkin’ ’bout Honey Boo Boo’s momma.

Or maybe I am.

Suggest to most people that 21st century wheat is a demonstrably addictive, glycemic index-popping nightmare, one that wreaks some level of havoc on most human bodies that consume it, and they roll their eyes. They peg you for a colloidal silver salesman. “Tell it to your orgone generator,” they say.

Yet credible evidence supporting this claim isn’t hard to come by. Cardiologist William Davis‘ book, for example. On a purely anecdotal level, I know four people (soon to be five, it seems) whose lives have been vastly improved by excluding wheat from their diets. One friend’s diabetes symptoms have receded to the point that he’s almost off medication, something his doctor had told him would never happen, and another friend’s chronic fatigue has disappeared entirely. I won’t bore you with example after example, but I will say that weight loss, where loss is appropriate, isn’t an issue in the context of a conscientiously wheat-free diet. It’s a given.

Granted, mine is the zeal of the convert, but it does so chap my ass that nobody at the national level ever says, “And while we’re at it, we totally need to tell people that wheat is slow poison, not just for the celiacs and the gluten intolerants, but for everyone.”

Instead, the party line is that we can keep on eating what we’re eating, but need to eat it more sensibly. Like our Surgeon General does, I guess. Jeeeezus.